SCHOOL LUNCHES NEGATIVE

SCHOOL LUNCHES NEGATIVE ON CASE

INDEXSCHOOL LUNCHES NEGATIVE ON CASE.................................................................................................1

Inherency.........................................................................................................................................2

Status Quo Solves – Trump’s Changes are Minor................................................................................2

Food Injustice Harms........................................................................................................................4

Food Injustice Declining Now..............................................................................................................4

Plan Does Not Help Local Food Justice Movements............................................................................5

Plan Does Not Solve for High Food Prices............................................................................................6

Alternative Causes to Food Insecurity.................................................................................................7

Massive Changes Beyond School Lunches Needed to Fix Food Injustice.............................................8

Federal Solutions to Poverty Fail.......................................................................................................11

Solvency.........................................................................................................................................13

School Lunches Does Not Lead to Healthiness..................................................................................13

School Practices Do Not Change Unhealthy Lifestyles.......................................................................14

Schools Skirt Federal Lunch Regulations............................................................................................15

Plan Makes Lunches More Expensive With Less Student Consumption............................................16

Waste Turn.....................................................................................................................................17

Students Choose Not Eat Healthier Lunches.....................................................................................17

Plan Decreases Nutrition of Students................................................................................................18

Schools Fabricated Student Consumption.........................................................................................19

Students Refuse to Eat Healthier Lunches as Disapproval.................................................................20

Students Do Not Like Healthy Lunches and Will Not Eat Them.........................................................21

Cost Turn........................................................................................................................................22

Plan Increases Lunch Prices – Less Kids Will Purchase Them.............................................................22

Increased Costs for Healthy Lunches Turns Academic Performance.................................................23

Increased Costs for Healthy Lunches Turns Health Benefits..............................................................24

Health Advantage...........................................................................................................................25

Small Farms Advantage..................................................................................................................30

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Inherency Status Quo Solves – Trump’s Changes are Minor

The current Department of Agriculture policy solves for poor nutrition – there is no impact to the Trump administrative changes and stricter regulations do not solve. Julie Kelly 17, National Review Online contributor, food policy writer, 5-8-2017, "Trump Administration Nibbles At Michelle Obama’s School Lunch Mess," Federalist, http://thefederalist.com/2017/05/08/trump-administration-nibbles-michelle-obamas-school-lunch-mess/The Trump administration is nibbling away at Michelle Obama’s school lunch program , a well-intentioned but flawed attempt to make kids eat better at school and stem rising childhood obesity rates. Congress passed the Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010, which set tight restrictions on dairy, salt, and sugar content in school meals while pushing fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

In one of his first acts as President Trump’s new secretary of Agriculture, Sonny Perdue announced modest changes on May 1 to give schools more “flexibility in menu planning so they can serve nutritious and appealing meals and encourage student participation in the meal programs.”

Far from the major overhaul to the program that critics wanted and supporters feared , the U.S. Department

of Agriculture will delay future sodium limits, ease whole-grain requirements, and let schools serve 1 percent flavored milk instead of the fat-free version: “This announcement is the result of years of feedback from students, school, and food service experts about the challenges they are facing,” Perdue said in a statement. “If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition.”The Schoolyard Wrath Michelle Obama WroughtSince Mrs. Obama’s signature policy went into effect, school district s have encountered a number of problems, from

budgets running in the red to garbage cans overflowing with discarded food . The rules force students to take either

a fruit or vegetable with each meal, and the produce is often tossed in the garbage.Schools struggle to replace white flour with whole grains to make edible items like bagels, tortillas, and grits. Restrictions on salt are so tough that there have been reports of teachers policing pickle intake and some students bringing in contraband salt packets for lunch. Kids started posting pictures of their inedible lunches under the hashtag #thanksMichelleObama.The School Nutrition Association, which supported the initial legislation but has since pushed for reform after seeing the fallout in cafeterias across the country, lauded Perdue’s plan to loosen “overly prescriptive reg ulation s that have resulted in unintended consequences, including reduced student lunch participation , higher costs and food waste .”There is scant evidence the law has achieved any measurable success , particularly in lowering childhood obesity

rates. According to one Centers for Disease Control survey, the obesity rate among high school students has increased from 13 percent in 2011 to 13.9 percent in 2015, with higher spikes among some demographics. Other studies show a slight uptick in fruit and vegetable consumption at some school districts, but whether that affects current or long-term health is unclear.We Don’t Know Enough to Make National Nutrition Plans

The bigger problem is that the guidelines are not rooted in science . There is no proof a diet low in sugar, sodium, and fat is “healthier” for children with developing brains and bodies. In fact, the lunch requirements mirror much of the same misguided dietary advice the federal government has given adults for more than three decades.Eliminating fat from our diets has not made American adults healthier or slimmer, and the same goes for children. For example, Canadian researchers recently found children who drank whole milk had higher Vitamin D intake and a lower body mass index than children who drank low-fat milk. Fat-free dairy products fail to satiate hungry appetites and are usually loaded with other fillers like extra sugar and artificial thickeners. Allowing schools to now offer 1 percent milk instead of skim doesn’t do much in this direction, either.Same for sodium. Right now, a high school lunch can’t have more than roughly a two-third teaspoon of sodium, which might sound generous but given the amount of naturally occurring sodium in everything from lunchmeat to salad dressing, it’s already a challenge. The next target would have reduced that further, to less than half a teaspoon. So while delaying the next target is laudable, there is no nutritional science that supports the current sodium limits. It leaves in place a needless regulation that will do nothing to make kids healthier or less hungry.

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We Can’t Afford Middle-Class Welfare

The Trump administration has only a few minor changes to school lunches – the Affirmative exaggerates the severity of the new guidelinesPaul Crookston 17, Collegiate Network fellow at National Review, 5-3-2017, "Rolling Back Michelle Obama’s Rules to ‘Make School Meals Great Again’," National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447315/michelle-obama-school-lunch-plan-rolled-back-trump-administrationAgriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue released a plan Monday to roll back the strict health standards for school meals championed in the last administration by Michelle Obama. Requirements for reduced sodium and mostly whole grains have been relaxed, and the title of the USDA’s press release declared that the plan would “Make School Meals Great Again.”

Of course, no change has been made to fruit and vegetable requirements , and the allowances for items such as salt and milk haven’t changed much. One percent milk is now allowed, rather than just skim, and the cap on salt for high schoolers moved up from 1,080 milligrams to 1,420. And thankfully for schools in the South, rescinding the requirement for whole grains allows them to have real grits again.

The nutritional changes are much less dramatic than is the reaction to them . On Washington Post’s Wonkblog,

Perdue is charged with “freez[ing] Michelle Obama’s plan to fight childhood obesity ,” in a story describing school-lunch policing as “one of former first lady Michelle Obama’s signature accomplishments.” Around thirty parents with nothing better to do protested Perdue’s announcement at Catoctin Elementary School in Leesburg, Va, chanting “healthy kids, healthy food,” and one yelled “Give a damn!” as a smiling Perdue left in an SUV.Despite their best efforts, the wonk bloggers at the Post can’t help but make the former first lady’s food guidelines sound terrible . They describe “replacing cafeteria staples such as conventional pizza with salt-reduced, whole-grain versions” and students bringing in “contraband salt shakers.” And, in what the Post calls a “second blow to the Obama administration’s nutritional legacy,” the FDA is also looking to rewrite the Obamacare nutrition-labeling rules that were proving

The status quo solves the problem – Trumps changes don’t do enough to alter the nutritional makeup of school lunchesScutti, 17 CNN Contributor, 5/2/2017 Susan, “USDA shifts Obama-era school lunch guidelines” http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/02/health/school-lunch-changes/ Schwartz believes the impact on an individual child's diet will be small and amount to a slightly higher

intake of saturated fat due to the higher fat content in flavored milk. " But it's not a big jump . It's

pretty small ," she said. With regard to whole grains and sodium, she believes any gains made in the

past will hold with no further improvements made . Rules to make school lunches healthier are

working , study finds "If this really helps, you know, food service directors have more flexibility and stay in the program and continue working towards improving the quality of the food they're serving, then that's OK with me," Schwartz said. Dr. Tanya

Altmann , a California pediatrician and spokeswoman for the American Academy of Pediatrics, said children get a third to half of their daily calories at school. "So school lunch programs are critical for helping a child reach their nutrient goals throughout

the day," she wrote in an email. " I'm fine with 1-percent (fat), flavored milk since all milk has important protein, calcium and (vitamin) D

that growing kids need." When it comes to loosening standards that regulate salt, which "has no nutrition benefit and can contribute

to unhealthy diet as a whole," and those regulating grains, Altmann is a little less "fine." "We already know that kids don't eat enough whole grains," she said. "Whole grains are important for growth and development, and I think that all of the grains kids eat should be whole grains whenever possible." A new USDA report on the nutritional quality, cost and acceptability of school meals as well as student diets will become

available by 2018. "It will be important to assess how much difference these changes make," Schwartz said. " It could have been a

whole lot worse from a nutrition standpoint ."

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Food Injustice Harms Food Injustice Declining Now

Food justice movements are strong and solving now – they are combating race and economic injustices in food distributionSmith, 16 Truthout News Analyst, (Rory Smith, The Future of the Food Justice Movement, May 07, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35915-the-future-of-the-food-justice-movement)

The food justice movement -- a loose but expansive conglomeration of organizations working to create a more just food system in the United States -- has accomplished a great deal over the last 30 years. But can it manage to converge in its diversity and create a countermovement potent enough to transform the current food regime? Or is it too shallow and too spread, destined to disappear in its disjointedness. Things may seem a little out of sorts when one in six Americans -- residents of the most affluent country on the planet -- don't have enough to eat, and when the percentage of hungry people in the United States has gone up 57 percent since the late 1990s. Sprinkle in that little detail about how Black and Latino neighborhoods are often left practically devoid of fresh produce but flooded with fast food restaurants (something that contributes to high rates of obesity, diabetes and thyroid disease), and you might start to question one or two things. Toss in the fact that many of the 2 million farm laborers who produce US consumers' fruits and vegetables are not only subjected to brutal labor conditions but also can't afford to consume the very same food they pick, and you might really start to wonder. And when you top off this gallimaufry with one more slight detail -- that there are 1 billion people around the world suffering from malnourishment, a number that hasn't changed significantly since the 1970s -- the inequity of the current food regime becomes pretty clear. It was the food justice movement that first recognized this reality, and it has spent the last 30 years challenging and redressing these inequalities. The Black Panthers' Free Breakfast for School Children Program, Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers, and the family farming caucuses that swept the United States during the 1980s were early proponents of food justice. And while these original players have been all but subsumed by the passage of time, they have been replaced by hundreds of thousands of farmworkers, urban and rural farmers, activists, consumers and academics who are all working to institute a fairer and more just food system. This effort is what Eric Holt-Giménez, the executive director of Food First, calls "converging in our diversity," and it is the linchpin of creating a just food system: a system that stresses the right of communities everywhere to produce, distribute and have equal access to healthy food, irrespective of class, gender or ethnicity. Just when that Rust Cohle-like pessimism seems to have obtruded on our collective consciousness -- foregrounded by our failure to engineer any overhaul of the US financial system and scientists' incredulous predictions on global warming -- the food justice movement could be that slow-cooked countermovement that we have all been waiting for. Everyone has some kind of a relationship with food. It is the cornerstone of culture and life, as well as of the capitalist system. If any revolution is going to be successful, this seems like a good place for it to start.

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Plan Does Not Help Local Food Justice Movements

Strong local community led food justice movements around issues of race & injustice are already happening now – federal action would be unhelpful Smith, 16 Truthout News Analyst, 16 (Rory Smith, The Future of the Food Justice Movement, May 07, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35915-the-future-of-the-food-justice-movement)

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the establishment of a Fair Foods label are revolutionary first steps in transforming labor practices in US agriculture. But both within US cities -- especially within Black and Latino neighborhoods -- as well as outside cities (most Native American reservations are deemed food deserts, having very little access to healthy food), issues of food insecurity and racial injustice remain severely problematic. It was with these structural inequalities in mind that Will Allen, later a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," founded Growing Power in 1993. Established with the idea that sustainable and community-based food systems could be utilized to dismantle racism and food insecurity on the North Side of Milwaukee, the organization has proliferated over the last 20 years, spreading not only through Milwaukee but also into Madison and Chicago. The organization -- employing locals to administer and coordinate each program -- utilizes a series of overlapping and multidisciplinary strategies, including the establishment of urban gardens, farmers' markets, youth training, leadership building and food policy councils to support local residents in becoming food secure and also offer trainings on the relevant business and farming skills to empower them economically. "It's about improving the economic conditions of people so they can do what they want with their resources," said Erika Allen, the Chicago and national projects director of Growing Power. "If you're able to grow food, sell it and supplement your income, you then have the ability to enjoy other enrichment experiences with your family. This was what the civil rights movement was about: It was about equal rights and access on a constitutional level to what our counterparts had access to."

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Plan Does Not Solve for High Food Prices

The plan doesn’t solve adequate nutrition – poor citizens cannot afford sufficient foodRachel Lucas 17, Reporter/Anchor for WSLS 10 in Southwest Virginia, “Rising cost of food pushes food insecure even farther behind,” WSLS 10, 5/31/17, http://www.wsls.com/news/local/rising-cost-of-food-pushes-food-insecure-even-farther-behindNew research from Feeding America Southwest Virginia shows that money for those facing food insecurity is getting even tighter . The latest “Map the Meal Gap” report for Southwest Virginia shows that all counties in the region face food insecurity. Rates range from as low as 7.3 point percent of the population in Bedford County to the high rate of 21.8 percent in Martinsville City. The study also finds that people currently facing hunger are likely falling further behind as they continue to struggle to buy enough food to meet their needs. Food-insecure individuals now face, on average, a food budget shortfall of $17.01 per person each week. That’s up from $16.56 last year.Amanda Allen with Feeding America Southwest Virginia says the reason for the rise in the budget shortfall of food budgets per

person per week is likely due to the rising cost of food, while their economic status remains unchanged.

"The cost of food, the cost of a meal has risen in a lot of places and I think that makes it difficult, for some they are already facing economic challenges and the cost of food goes up and now it gets harder and harder," Allen saidThe latest report details food insecurity and the cost of food at both the county and congressional district level. The national average food insecurity rate across all counties is 14 percent.“This important research continues to show that Feeding America Southwest Virginia’s mission is critical to the lives of those in our region facing hunger,” says Pamela Irvine, Feeding America Southwest Virginia’s President and CEO. “Residents who were already struggling find themselves struggling even more . In areas such as Virginia’s coalfields, the challenging economic conditions mean even more people face food insecurity than in previous years .” Feeding America Southwest Virginia is one of 200 food banks in the Feeding America network that collectively provide food assistance to 46 million Americans struggling with hunger. Serving 26 counties and nine cities through a network of more than 350 partner programs in Southwest Virginia, FASWVA distributed enough food to provide 14.6 million meals in 2016.“It is disheartening to realize that millions of hardworking, low-income Americans are finding it increasingly difficult to feed themselves and their families at the same time that our economy is showing many signs of improvement, including a substantial decline in the number of people who are unemployed,” said Diana Aviv, CEO of Feeding America. “This study underscores the need for strong federal nutrition programs as well of the importance of charitable food assistance programs , especially the food pantries and meal programs served by the Feeding America network of food banks.”

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Alternative Causes to Food Insecurity

Food injustice is not limited to school lunches – there are many alternatives causes that contribute to food insecurity Waxman, 17 (Elaine Waxman, senior fellow in the Income and Benefits Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Her expertise includes food insecurity, nutrition and the food assistance safety net, the social determinants of health disparities, and other issues affecting low-income families and communities. Before joining Urban, Waxman was vice president of research and nutrition at Feeding America She holds an MPP and a PhD from the University of Chicago, where she is a lecturer.) (Food insecurity in the summer: Thinking outside the lunch box) [http://www.urban.org/urban-wire/food-insecurity-summer-thinking-outside-lunch-box] Accessed: 6/27/17 LGFFor one group of teen girls in Portland, Oregon, the talk about summer was not of camps, family vacations, and carefree days. It was about whether they and others they knew would have enough to eat without school meals. “It's kind of sad because there's some people that basically live on the school lunches,” one Portland teenager told the Urban Institute in a recent focus group. In 2015, 22 million school-age children participated in the free or reduced price National School Lunch Program. But the number of children who continue to access food assistance in the summer is dramatically lower. Only about 2.6 million children participate in the federally funded Summer Food Service Program, a little more than 1 in 10 who receive free and reduced price school meals. Households with children have higher rates of food insecurity during the summer months because more people are at home and fewer resources are available without school lunches. Some research also suggests that child obesity rates increase in the summer; in some households, families may rely on cheaper, less healthy foods to stretch their budgets. The Summer Food Service Program has tried to adopt the school lunch model by providing meals in group settings for kids at parks, community centers, and schools, sometimes in connection with other programming. But this strategy has encountered significant barriers: it can be tough to find enough program sponsors and sites during summer months; kids may not have transportation to a site, especially in suburban and rural areas; families with limited resources may be reluctant to invest time and money getting to a site without child care or other programming available for kids; parents or caregivers aren’t eligible for the meals; and teens often think the program is only for elementary school kids or fear the embarrassment of being seen getting a free meal. In spite of vigorous efforts by the US Department of Agriculture and community partners to expand access to the Summer Food Service Program, we still haven’t made much progress in solving the challenge of summer food insecurity.

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Massive Changes Beyond School Lunches Needed to Fix Food Injustice

Large radical changes to society would be needed to change the nature of poverty and racism school lunches do not change institutional racismLayton, 15 Covers national education for the Washington Post, 15 (Lyndsey Layton, Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty, January 16, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html?utm_term=.9964a392f895)

For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound implications for the nation. The Southern Education Foundation reports that 51 percent of students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade in the 2012-2013 school year were eligible for the federal program that provides free and reduced-price lunches. The lunch program is a rough proxy for poverty, but the explosion in the number of needy children in the nation’s public classrooms is a recent phenomenon that has been gaining attention among educators, public officials and researchers. “We’ve all known this was the trend, that we would get to a majority, but it’s here sooner rather than later,” said Michael A. Rebell of the Campaign for Educational Equity at Teachers College at Columbia University, noting that the poverty rate has been increasing even as the economy has improved. “A lot of people at the top are doing much better, but the people at the bottom are not doing better at all. Those are the people who have the most children and send their children to public school.” The shift to a majority-poor student population means that in public schools, a growing number of children start kindergarten already trailing their more privileged peers and rarely, if ever, catch up. They are less likely to have support at home, are less frequently exposed to enriching activities outside of school, and are more likely to drop out and never attend college. It also means that education policy, funding decisions and classroom instruction must adapt to the needy children who arrive at school each day. “When they first come in my door in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are eligible for free lunches. She helps them clean up with bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean socks, underwear, pants and shoes. Romero-Smith, 40, who has been a teacher for 19 years, became a foster mother in November to two girls, sisters who attend her school. They had been homeless, their father living on the streets and their mother in jail, she said. When she brought the girls home, she was shocked by the disarray of their young lives. “Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food, flushing a toilet and washing hands, it took us a little while,” she said. “You spend some time with little ones like this and it’s gut wrenching. . . . These kids aren’t thinking, ‘Am I going to take a test today?’ They’re thinking, ‘Am I going to be okay?’ ” The job of teacher has expanded to “counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, attorney,” she said. Schools, already under intense pressure to deliver better test results and meet more rigorous standards, face the doubly difficult task of trying to raise

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the achievement of poor children so that they approach the same level as their more affluent peers. “This is a watershed moment when you look at that map,” said Kent McGuire, president of the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education philanthropy, referring to a large swath of the country filled with high-poverty schools. “The fact is, we’ve had growing inequality in the country for many years,” he said. “It didn’t happen overnight, but it’s steadily been happening. Government used to be a source of leadership and innovation around issues of economic prosperity and upward mobility. Now we’re a country disinclined to invest in our young people.” The data show poor students spread across the country, but the highest rates are concentrated in Southern and Western states. In 21 states, at least half the public school children were eligible for free and reduced-price lunches — ranging from Mississippi, where more than 70 percent of students were from low-income families, to Illinois, where one of every two students was low-income. Carey Wright, Mississippi’s state superintendent of education, said quality preschool is the key to helping poor children. “That’s huge,” she said. “These children can learn at the highest levels, but you have to provide for them. You can’t assume they have books at home, or they visit the library or go on vacations. You have to think about what you’re doing across the state and ensuring they’re getting what other children get.” Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, was born in a charity hospital in 1959 to a single mother. Federal programs helped shrink the obstacles he faced, first by providing him with Head Start, the early-childhood education program, and later, Pell grants to help pay tuition at the University of Texas, he said. The country needs to make that same commitment today to help poor children, he said. “Even at 8 or 9 years old, I knew that America wanted me to succeed,” he said. “What we know is that the mobility escalator has simply stopped for some Americans. I was able to ride that mobility escalator in part because there were so many people, and parts of our society, cheering me on.” “We need to fix the escalator,” he said. “We fix it by recommitting ourselves to the idea of public education. We have the capacity. The question is, do we have the will?” The new report raises questions among educators and officials about whether states and the federal government are devoting enough money — and using it effectively — to meet the complex needs of poor children. The Obama administration wants Congress to add $1 billion to the $14.4 billion it spends annually to help states educate poor children. It also wants Congress to fund preschool for those from low-income families. Collectively, the states and the federal government spend about $500 billion annually on primary and secondary schools, about $79 billion of it from Washington. The amount spent on each student can vary wildly from state to state. States with high student-poverty rates tend to spend less per student: Of the 27 states with the highest percentages of student poverty, all but five spent less than the national average of $10,938 per student. Republicans in Congress have been wary of new spending programs, arguing that more money is not necessarily the answer and that federal dollars could be more effective if redundant programs were streamlined and more power was given to states. Many Republicans also think that the government ought to give tax dollars to low-income families to use as vouchers for private-school tuition, believing that is a better alternative to public schools. GOP leaders in Congress have rebuffed President Obama’s calls to fund preschool for low-income families, although a number of Republican and Democratic governors have initiated state programs in the past several years. The report comes as Congress begins debate about rewriting the country’s main federal education law, first passed as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” and designed to help states

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educate poor children. The most recent version of the law, known as No Child Left Behind, has emphasized accountability and outcomes, measuring whether schools met benchmarks and sanctioning them when they fell short. That federal focus on results, as opposed to need, is wrongheaded, Rebell said. “We have to think about how to give these kids a meaningful education,” he said. “We have to give them quality teachers, small class sizes, up-to-date equipment. But in addition, if we’re serious, we have to do things that overcome the damages of poverty. We have to meet their health needs, their mental health needs, after-school programs, summer programs, parent engagement, early-childhood services. These are the so-called wraparound services. Some people think of them as add-ons. They’re not. They’re imperative.”

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Federal Solutions to Poverty Fail

Focusing on federal anti-poverty initiatives do not work – and economic mobility is still possible.Tanner, Senior Fellow and director of research on social programs at Cato, 16(Michael D., “Five Myths about Economic Inequality in America,” Cato Institute, September 7, https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/five-myths-about-economic-inequality-america)

Traditionally, we have tried to reduce inequality by taxing the rich and redistributing that money to the poor. And, as noted above, we have achieved some success. But we may well have reached a point of diminishing returns from such policies. Despite the U nited States spending roughly a trillion dollars each year on anti-poverty programs at all levels of government, by the official poverty measure we have done little to reduce poverty .85 Even by using more accurate alternative poverty measures, gains leveled out during the 1970s, apart from the latter part of the 1990s when the booming economy and the reform of the welfare system produced significant reductions in poverty. Additional increases in spending have yielded few gains . Thus, while redistribution may have reduced overall inequality, it has done far less to help lift people out of poverty.And even in terms of attacking inequality, redistribution may have reached the limits of its

ability to make a difference. A new study from the Brookings Institution, for example, suggests that further increasing taxes on the wealthy, accompanied by increased transfers to the poor, would have relatively little effect on inequality . This study by William Gale, Melissa Kearney, and Peter Orszag looked at what outcome could be expected if the top tax rate was raised to 50 percent from its current 39.6 percent, and all additional revenue raised was redistributed to households in the lowest quintile of current incomes. To bias the study in favor of redistribution, the authors assume no change in behavior from the wealthy in an effort to reduce their exposure to the higher tax rate. The tax hike, therefore, would raise $96 billion in additional revenue, which would allow additional redistribution of $2,650 to each household in the bottom quintile—an amount that would not significantly reduce inequality. The authors conclude, “That such a sizable increase in the top personal income tax rate leads to a strikingly limited reduction in income inequality speaks to the limitations of this particular approach to addressing the broader challenge.”86Indeed, many advocates of increased taxes for the wealthy seem to concede that their efforts would do little to reduce poverty. Rather, they would reduce inequality from the top down. Piketty, for example, argues for a globally imposed wealth tax and a U.S. income tax rate of 80 percent on incomes over $500,000 per year.87 He acknowledges this tax “would not bring the government much in the way of revenue,” but that it would “distribute the fruits of growth more widely while imposing reasonable limits on economically useless (or even harmful) behavior.”88Other critics of inequality seem equally concerned with punishing the rich. Hillary Clinton, for instance, argues that

fighting inequality requires a “toppling” of the one percent.89 But the ultimate losers of such policies are

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likely to be the poor . Piketty’s plan might indeed lead to a society that would be more equal, but it would also likely be a society where everyone is far poorer.Economic growth , after all, depends on people who are ambitious, skilled risk-takers . We need such people to be ever-striving for more in order to fuel economic growth. That means they must be rewarded for their efforts, their skills, their ambitions, and their risks . Such rewards inevitably lead to greater inequality. But as Nobel Economics Prize-winning economist Gary Becker pointed out, “It would be hard to motivate the vast majority of individuals to exert much effort, including creative effort, if everyone had the same earnings, status, prestige, and other types of rewards.”90To be sure, since the 1970s the relationship between economic growth and poverty reduction has been uneven at best. But we are unlikely to see significant reductions in poverty without strong economic growth. Punishing the segment of society that most contributes to such growth therefore seems a poor policy for serious poverty reduction.

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Solvency School Lunches Does Not Lead to Healthiness

School lunch changes are too small solve problems of unhealthy eating – there must cultural shift regarding eating habitsHaskins, 05 Senior fellow at Brookings(Ron Haskins, The School Lunch Lobby, 2005 / VOL. 5, NO. 3, http://educationnext.org/the-school-lunch-lobby/)

The school-lunch reauthorization bill enacted by Congress last year contained a host of measures to improve nutrition, such as encouraging the Department of Agriculture to make more fresh fruits and vegetables available to local schools, creating an initiative to encourage partnerships between schools and local produce farms, and increasing the availability of whole grains in school meals. Of course, Congress and school administrators must face the fact that students will not necessarily make the food choices that are best for their health. Children will choose a salad over a juicy cheeseburger about as often as they choose educational TV over MTV. It is hard to argue with any of these good food initiatives, but expectations about how much school food programs can contribute to increasing the consumption of nutritious foods and reducing the national problem with childhood obesity should be modest. There are after all, around 120,000 elementary and secondary schools in the United States, and more than 90 percent of them participate in the school-lunch program. Trying to move all these facilities in the same direction is a huge undertaking. What’s more, even if school food met every guideline for fat, saturated fat, and sugar, the impact on children’s weight would probably be modest because children’s consumption of food at home and in fast-food pens would continue unabated. By the time they reach middle and late childhood, students seem determined to maximize consumption of their two favorite food groups: fat and sugar. Children’s preference for foods that are bound to make them fatter is established outside the school system. Unless we are prepared to remove all unhealthy foods from the schools–to minimize consumption of sugars and fats–there are obvious limits to the strategy of giving kids food choices. Schools can and should fight to improve the consumption of nutritious foods, and even to change students’ eating habits, but unless the nation’s food culture, food advertising, and patterns of food consumption at home and in fast-food restaurants undergo massive change, the schools will be waging little more than a rear-guard action. Even so, given the level of federal spending on the school food programs, it is reasonable to expect both Congress and the Department of Agriculture to put pressure on schools to aggressively implement wellness policies that minimize the consumption of fat and sugar on school property. To do so, schools may well be forced to reduce some food choices that have minimal nutritional value. Expect school lunch to continue moving inexorably along its well-traveled path of slow change and modest improvement while relying on its friends inside and outside Congress to fight off big shocks and spending cuts. At this very moment, as in 1981 and 1995, Washington is gearing up to make

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serious cuts in social programs to balance the budget. Will school lunch, and that 20 cents per meal middle-class subsidy, be on the menu? Fat chance.

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School Practices Do Not Change Unhealthy Lifestyles

Childhood health practices don’t influence adult behavior – obesity rates proveBasham & Luik, 08 Professor at Johns Hopkins & Senior Fellow at the Democracy Institute(Basham, Patrick, and John Luik. "Is the obesity epidemic exaggerated? Yes." BMJ: British Medical Journal 336.7638 (2008): 244)

There is considerable evidence that most fat adults were not fat children.14 Moreover, the thousand families cohort study found both little consistency between childhood overweight and adult obesity and no net increase in adult risk of disease for overweight children or teenagers. Nor did childhood thinness protect against either adult obesity or coronary vascular disease.14 15 Some in the public health community believe that deliberate exaggeration or, indeed, misrepresentation of the risks of diseases or certain behaviours or our capacity to prevent or treat them on a population-wide basis is justified, if not demanded, in the interests of health. Since many of the exaggerations come from people who understand the scientific uncertainties around overweight and obesity, it seems that these individuals have adopted such an approach to the obesity epidemic. The unwelcome implications of this for science policy and for evidence based medicine dwarf those of any obesity epidemic, real or imagined.

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Schools Skirt Federal Lunch Regulations

Schools circumvent federal lunch regulations – they are too expensive to followFox News, 17(Republicans look to scrap Michelle Obama school lunch plan, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/01/25/republicans-look-to-scrap-michelle-obama-school-lunch-plan.html)

Since 2012, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has implemented the requirement – tied to the 2010 law – that schools include either a fruit or vegetable for lunches subsidized by the federal government. However, a report published in August 2015 by researchers at the University of Vermont found even though students added more fruits and vegetables to their plates, “children consumed fewer [fruits and vegetables] and wasted more during the school year immediately following implementation of the USDA rule.” Titled “Impact of the National School Lunch Program on Fruit and Vegetable Selection,” the report noted that average waste increased from a quarter cup to more than one-third of a cup per tray. Observing students at two northeastern elementary schools during more than 20 visits to each, researchers took photos of students’ trays after they chose their items, as they were exiting the lunch line and again as they went by the garbage cans. The study's conclusions comport with widespread complaints from school officials and parents that the program encourages food waste. It also has drawn criticism for cost, implementation difficulties and unpopularity with students. Further, since the restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grains, fruits and vegetables went into effect, it is estimated that over 1.2 million students have stopped eating school lunches, according to EAGnews.org. School systems also dropped out of the program because it led in some cases to compliance costs exceeding the amount of federal subsidies received.

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Plan Makes Lunches More Expensive With Less Student Consumption

Federal school lunch guidelines have schools pay more for worse food that lessens student consumption of school mealsKlein, 17 Reporter covering the first family, politics, and pop culture for CNN, 3 – 15 – 17 – (Betsy Klein, Michelle Obama's healthy school lunch program in jeopardy?, http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/14/politics/michelle-obama-healthy-hunger-free-kids-act/)

With a Republican administration in the White House (and a President who is known to enjoy fast food), the School Nutrition Administration hopes to earn the support to scale back the regulations. "Overly prescriptive regulations have resulted in unintended consequences, including reduced student lunch participation, higher costs and food waste. Federal nutrition standards should be modified to help school menu planners manage these challenges and prepare nutritious meals that appeal to diverse student tastes," the association said in its recommendations. Republican lawmakers are also likely eager to make the change, led by House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows. The North Carolina congressman compiled a list of over 300 rules, regulations and executive orders the new administration should consider rolling back in its first 100 days, including the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. "The federal government involving itself in what is served in school lunches is the epitome of government overreach," Meadows told the Washington Examiner, calling the federal lunch program standards "overly burdensome." "Districts that have chosen to opt out have been able to provide more options to students and better-quality services ... It's the perfect example of how government interference generally makes a small problem far worse."

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Waste Turn Students Choose Not Eat Healthier Lunches

The plan results in more food waste – healthier lunches don’t get eaten – turns the Affirmative. San Diego Tribune, 17 “ School lunch rules needed the change” http://www.heraldandnews.com/members/forum/editorials/school-lunch-rules-needed-the-change/article_75c940ee-b203-538e-ad10-8d779b54233a.htmlThe Trump administration’s decision to relax some of the school lunch rules involving sodium intake, whole grain content and milk approved in 2012, following the provisions of a 2010 law adopted at the behest of then-first lady Michelle Obama, drew fire from some health experts. An American Heart Association official warned that “there could be serious health consequences” for students.

But in explaining the decision to give school districts the option to not meet strict standards, Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue made a crucial point: “ If kids aren’t eating the food, and it’s ending up in the trash, they aren’t getting any nutrition — thus undermining the

intent of the program .” Patricia Montague, CEO of the School Nutrition Association, agreed with the decision: “We have been wanting flexibility so that schools can serve meals that are both nutritious and palatable . We don’t want kids wasting their meals by throwing them away .” The evidence that the

lunch rules backfired is considerable . A 2013 study estimated that 1 .1 million students had stopped

buying school lunches in the 2012-13 school year, the first year-to-year decline after nearly a decade of

steady increases. Another 2013 study pegged the annual cost of wasted food at school cafeterias at

$1 .24 billion . Anyone who doubts student antipathy to school food should search #ThanksMichelleObama on Twitter for a look at photos of lunches that left kids fed up instead of fed. Good

intentions don’t always pay off with good results. Having a healthy school lunch menu achieves

nothing if the lunch goes uneaten .

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Plan Decreases Nutrition of Students

Increased amounts of food waste turns the Affirmative and undermines any nutritional valueGrills, 15 PhD in Public PolicyDerek, Dissertation, “The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act and High School Obesity” http://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2380&context=dissertationsLong-term, widespread increases in high school obesity rates , despite the devastating individual and societal healthcare costs, suggests that

obesity is caused by multiple interrelated factors and is not subject to influence by knowledge of 75 consequences (Skelton, et al., 2012) . Research suggests that a well-balanced diet rich in fruit and vegetables is the healthiest lifestyle in terms of obesity. The fact that the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) provides 33% of the nutritional needs for 28 million school children of low income

families makes it an attractive point for federal intervention. Despite these seemingly related observations , there was no evidence in the literature, nor in this study, that modifying the amount and types of food provided by NLSP would have any effect on high school obesity rates . This finding is important in light of the complaints by school boards that children were throwing away the fruit and vegetables served in the school cafeteria. Using the NSLP to reduce obesity may have the perverse effect of children consuming less nutrition than

recommended due to increases in fruit and vegetables that are not consumed .

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Schools Fabricated Student Consumption

The plan increases food waste— their studies are based on biased anecdotal evidence by school officials who have an incentive to make it seem like their programs are workingWelch 2015Ashley, correspondent for CBS covering wellness and health, “School lunch fruits and veggies often tossed in trash, study finds”, CBS, August 25, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-lunch-fruits-and-veggies-often-tossed-in-trash-study-finds/New federal guidelines requiring healthier school lunches have made headlines in recent years, but that doesn't mean kids are eating them up . In fact, a study conducted soon after the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act went into effect found what many parents suspected: a lot of school children were taking the required fruits and

vegetables and throwing them directly into the trash . The small study, published online Tuesday in Public Health Reports, comes about a month

before Congress is scheduled to vote on whether to reauthorize the program. Researchers from the University of Vermont used digital photography to capture images of students' lunch trays after they selected their food, as they were leaving the lunch line, and again at the end of their lunch as they passed the food disposal area . They found that

while children placed more fruits and vegetables on their trays - as required by the USDA mandates put in place in 2012 - they consumed fewer of them. The

amount of food wasted increased by 56 percent , the researchers found. "We saw this as a great opportunity to access the policy change and ask a

really important question, which was, 'Does requiring a child to select a fruit or vegetable under the updated national school lunch program guidelines that came into effect in 2012 correspond with increased fruit and vegetable consumption ? '" lead study author Sarah Amin told CBS News. " The answer was clearly no ." Amin and her team documented hundreds of tray observations over 21 visits to two elementary schools in the Northeast both before and shortly after the implementation of the USDA guidelines . About half of the students at the schools qualified for free or reduced price lunch , a marker for low socioeconomic status. This isn't the first study to look at fruit and vegetable

consumption in school children after the federal guidelines passed. A 2014 study from the Harvard School of Public Health found the opposite result - that kids actually ate more fruits and vegetables after the new standards were put into place. Amin said that although the sample of two schools in the current study is small, the results correspond to anecdotal information from school nutrition directors and other school officials about kids'

responses to the school meal regulations . "We used rigorous, validated dietary assessment methods, "

she said. "That's what really bolsters our confidence in these findings. They may not be generalizable across the country. There might be different patterns depending on different sociodemographic characteristics, but for the schools we collected data on and in that time period using these methods, we're confident in our findings."

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Students Refuse to Eat Healthier Lunches as Disapproval

Students will backlash to new rules – decreases participation and causes more uneaten foods. Murphy 2015Kate, New York Times correspondent regarding health and education, “Why Students Hate School Lunches”, New York Times, September 26, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/sunday-review/why-students-hate-school-lunches.html

Food and nutrition directors at school districts nationwide say that their trash cans are overflowing

while their cash register receipts are diminishing as children either toss out the healthier meals or

opt to brown-bag it . While no one argues that the solution is to scrap the law and go back to feeding children junk, there’s been a movement to relax a few of the guidelines

as Congress considers whether to reauthorize the legislation, particularly mandates for 100 percent whole grains and extremely low sodium levels, so school meals will be a bit more palatable

and reflective of culinary traditions. “Other than mandating more fruits and vegetables, the new regulations haven’t

really changed anything except force manufacturers to re-engineer products ” so they meet the

guidelines but not children’s taste expectations , said Bertrand Weber, director of culinary and nutrition services at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

“Now kids get whole grain doughnuts — whoop-de-do .” And yet, cafeteria operators complain, the new regulations forbid them to serve a classic baguette, semolina pasta or jasmine rice, much less the butter and flavorful sauces that often go with them. Never mind that these are staples of diets in other cultures with far lower rates of childhood and adult obesity than in the United States . Consider that in France, where the childhood obesity rate is the lowest in the Western world, a typical four-course school lunch (cucumber salad with vinaigrette, salmon lasagna with spinach, fondue with baguette for dipping and fruit compote for dessert) would probably not pass muster under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, because of the refined grains, fat, salt and calories. Nor would the weekly piece of dark

chocolate cake. By comparison, a typical federally approved school lunch in the United States is a “reformulated” Philly cheesesteak sandwich (low-fat, low-salt processed cheese and lean mystery meat on a whole grain bun) with steamed green beans, a potato wedge, canned peaches and an apple. Students often have less than 20 minutes to eat this before returning to class, while French children may have as long as

two hours to eat and socialize. Not surprisingly, American kids, whether pressed for time or just grossed out, leave much of their meals

untouched; particularly neglected are the fruits and vegetables, which they are now forced to put on

their trays before they can exit the cafeteria line. The School Nutrition Association said that 70 percent of school meal programs had taken a significant financial hit since the new

mandates went into effect. Cafeteria operators from Los Angeles to New York report discouraging amounts of food

waste and declining participation . “ We lost 15 percent of our revenue when we started putting the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act into place ,” said Chris Burkhardt, director of child nutrition and wellness at the Lakota Local School District in southwestern Ohio. “I talk to P.T.O. and P.T.A. groups and ask how many serve only whole grains and low sodium foods at home and maybe one hand goes up,” adding that he’s not convinced that person was telling the truth.

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Students Do Not Like Healthy Lunches and Will Not Eat Them

Statistics prove food waste – over 1 million students did not consume the lunches and create more waste. Harrington 2014Elizabeth, staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon, “1M kids stop school lunch due to Michelle Obama’s standards”, Washington Times, March 6, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/mar/6/1m-kids-stop-school-lunch-due-michelle-obamas-stan/New school lunch standards implemented as a result of First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign have led to more than 1 million children leaving the lunch line, according to a new

report. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a wide-ranging audit of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act nutrition standards last

week, finding 48 out of 50 states faced challenges complying with Mrs. Obama’s Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. The new standards led to kids throwing out their

fruits and vegetables, student boycotts, higher lunch costs , and odd food pairings such as “cheese

stick with shrimp” in order for schools to comply with the complicated rules. The N ational S chool L unch P rogram saw a sharp decline in participation once the healthy standards went into effect during the 2012-

2013 school year. A total of 1,086,000 students stopped buying school lunch , after participation had increased

steadily for nearly a decade. The report found that 321 districts left the National School Lunch Program

altogether , many of which cited the new standards as a factor. Though the USDA has claimed the standards were “proving popular,” the GAO report cited numerous cases where kids are unhappy with their new menus . The standards forced some schools to stop serving peanut

butter and jelly sandwiches, and led middle school and high school students to opt for vending machines or buying food off campus to avoid the lunch line. The GAO conducted a nationwide survey of nutrition directors and visited 17 schools in eight school districts for the audit. In each district, “ students expressed dislike for certain foods that

were served to comply with the new requirements , such as whole grain-rich products and vegetables in the beans and peas (legumes) and red-

orange sub-groups, and this may have affected participation.” The standards brought “negative student reactions.” In one case, middle school and high school students organized a three-week boycott after their school changed their sandwiches to comply with the rules. All eight School Food Authorities (SFAs) the GAO visited “modified or eliminated” popular food items. One district had to

cut cheeseburgers because “adding cheese to the district’s burger patties would have made it difficult to stay within the weekly meat maximums.” The new standards are

exhaustive , including calorie ranges for each age group, sodium limits, zero tolerance for trans fats, and specific ounce amounts for meats and grains. White bread will be mostly phased out beginning in 2014 because only “whole grain rich” items will be allowed. Portion requirements and calorie limits are also in conflict, leading some SFAs to add unhealthy food such as pudding or potato chips to the menu, and serve odd food combinations in order to meet the rules. “For example, one SFA served saltine crackers and croutons with certain salads to meet the minimum daily grain requirement and a cheese stick with shrimp to meet

the minimum daily meat requirement,” the GAO said. Unappetizing food led to the biggest problem school officials faced: food

waste . “Students may take the food components they are required to as part of the school lunch but

then choose not to eat them ,” the GAO said. As a result, 48 out of 50 states cited waste as a challenge . “In our lunch period observations in 7 of 17 schools, we saw many students throw away some or all of their fruits and vegetables,” the GAO said. The “morale” for cafeteria workers has also suffered under the new standards. “Staff in one SFA noted that the increased amount of time and effort to prepare fruits and vegetables also led to morale issues when staff saw students throw the fruits and vegetables in the trash,” the GAO said.

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Cost Turn Plan Increases Lunch Prices – Less Kids Will Purchase Them

Compliance costs overwhelms the plan’s benefits – it forces schools the raise the costs of lunches which causes less kids to eat them undermining health benefits. Wolfgang, 2011 The Washington Times ContributorBen, “‘Healthier’ school lunch at what cost?” http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/16/healthier-school-lunch-at-what-cost/If the federal government gets its way , critics are warning, school lunches will be more expensive and less appetizing and ultimately will leave school districts footing the bill for costly food going down the garbage

disposal . Under regulations proposed this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would have the final say on what students eat.

Educators fear the guidelines , trumpeted by first lady Michelle Obama and others as a key to curbing childhood obesity, will take a huge bite out of school

budgets while resulting in “healthier” meals that make youngsters turn up their noses . “Under the proposed rule, school meals would become so restrictive they would be unpalatable to many students ,” said

Karen Castaneda, director of food service at Pennridge School District in Perkasie, Pa. For example, Ms. Castaneda said, the proposed sodium restrictions for student lunches resemble diets previously reserved for those battling serious illnesses such as kidney disease. The rules also would require students to eat more fruits and vegetables, forcing schools to serve extra apples and broccoli even if experience shows that children can’t - or won’t - eat them. Breakfast programs are especially worrisome. “The proposal will double the fruit serving … [and] would add a required meat serving daily,” said Sally Spero, food planning supervisor for the San Diego Unified School District. “Nothing is achieved when money is spent on food that children won’t even be able to consume and nothing is more disheartening … than to see perfectly good and perfectly

untouched food thrown into the trash.” The regulations would also require schools to spend more money for fresh fruits and vegetables. Many districts now serve cheaper canned fruits or frozen vegetables. Administration officials say they have no interest in becoming what one called “the cupcake police,” and noted that educators, parents and the general public had been given time to

comment and suggest changes. The public comment period ended April 13, and all suggestions will be analyzed and possibly incorporated into the final version, the Agriculture Department said in a statement Friday to The Washington Times. The department also noted that the proposed

rules are meant solely to “align school meals with the dietary guidelines as recommended by National Academies’ Institute of Medicine.” What the government sees as a drive for more nutritious meals, some in the states see as an unfunded mandate from Washington . Ms. Castaneda said her district’s food budget , including breakfast and lunch programs, would increase by $111,234 under the guidelines taking shape. Federal school lunch program reimbursements would cover $32,460, leaving the Pennridge district little choice but to raise lunch prices to come up with the remaining $78,774 .

“ Our concern is that t he proposed regulation may result in having the opposite effect to that which it

desires, driving up costs and driving children … out of the program ,” said Barry Sackin, owner of B. Sackin and Associates, a consulting firm specializing in school

nutrition. Many of those issues received an airing at a House subcommittee hearing last week at which Mr. Sackin, Ms. Castaneda and Ms. Spero all testified. Some House Republicans have raised questions over whether the Obama administration has overstepped its authority in trying to dictate nutritional and other values for local school lunch programs. After President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act last year, Agriculture Department officials began crafting the new dietary rules, which remain under internal review. While supporting healthy food for students, Mr. Sackin said, the proposed rule strives for perfection by sacrificing the “very good.” “Unfortunately, there is a perception that if we fix school meals we can fix childhood obesity. But the reality is that school meals are already the healthiest meals that many children eat,” he

told lawmakers. “The fact that too many children start school already overweight certainly suggests that schools aren’t the cause.” The American Association of School Administrators has called the plan a “direct unfunded mandate” imposed on school districts. The National School Boards Association on Friday released a statement saying it is “ gravely concerned

about the financial impact the law could have on school districts at a time when many are in dire

economic straits .” “Two years after implementation, the cost of a school breakfast may increase by more than 25 cents. The cost of a school lunch will have increased by more than 7 cents,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter, the California Republican who

chairs the House subcommittee focusing on primary and secondary education issues. “ The total compliance costs will reach $6.8 billion by 2016, costs that

will fall heavily on states and schools.”

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Increased Costs for Healthy Lunches Turns Academic Performance

The plan drains school budgets---that directly trades off with teaching and turns the academic performance advantageDaren Bakst, 14, The Heritage Foundation's research fellow in agricultural policy, 6-24-2014, "Why Michelle Obama Is Wrong on School Lunches," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/why-michelle-obama-wrong-school-lunchesThis arrogance is on display in the current controversy over the new and restrictive federal school meal standards . Since the

2010-11 school year, participation in the school lunch program has fallen dramatically after more than a decade of growth. Most of the decline occurred in the 2012-2013 school year, when participation fell by over a million students. This just so happens to be the first year that the standards were in effect.

Schools are incur ring massive costs to comply with the standards. Some schools have reportedly

transferred money out of their teaching budgets to cover the food costs. There’s massive plate

waste , food storage and equipment costs , and little flexibility for local schools to meet the needs of their students.Michelle Obama has scolded anyone who dares to address concerns about these standards, including the School Nutrition Association

(SNA), which represents more than 55,000 school nutrition professionals. That may be the only way to counter the legitimate concerns that the school system’s foot soldiers are seeing firsthand.SNA, though, isn’t the only organization highlighting the problems. The independent Government Accountability Office did a survey of school nutrition officers . These officials expressed similar concerns, including problems with plate waste and food costs . According to the National School Board Association, “School boards cannot ignore the higher costs and operational

issues created by the rigid mandates of the H ealthy, H unger- F ree K ids A ct.”

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Increased Costs for Healthy Lunches Turns Health Benefits

The plan drains school budgets – turns the Affirmative’s ability to provide health benefits and increased student educationDaren Bakst 14, The Heritage Foundation's research fellow in agricultural policy, 6-24-2014, "Why Michelle Obama Is Wrong on School Lunches," Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/public-health/commentary/why-michelle-obama-wrong-school-lunchesThis arrogance is on display in the current controversy over the new and restrictive federal school meal standards . Since the

2010-11 school year, participation in the school lunch program has fallen dramatically after more than a decade of growth. Most of the decline occurred in the 2012-2013 school year, when participation fell by over a million students. This just so happens to be the first year that the standards were in effect.

Schools are incur ring massive costs to comply with the standards. Some schools have reportedly

transferred money out of their teaching budgets to cover the food costs. There’s massive plate

waste , food storage and equipment costs , and little flexibility for local schools to meet the needs of their students.Michelle Obama has scolded anyone who dares to address concerns about these standards, including the School Nutrition Association

(SNA), which represents more than 55,000 school nutrition professionals. That may be the only way to counter the legitimate concerns that the school system’s foot soldiers are seeing firsthand.SNA, though, isn’t the only organization highlighting the problems. The independent Government Accountability Office did a survey of school nutrition officers . These officials expressed similar concerns, including problems with plate waste and food costs . According to the National School Board Association, “School boards cannot ignore the higher costs and operational

issues created by the rigid mandates of the H ealthy, H unger- F ree K ids A ct.”

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Health Advantage Health care costs going down – limited deficit impactGrunwald, 14 senior national correspondent at Time magazine,(Michael Grunwald, Lower Health Care Costs Brighten America's Debt Outlook, Jul 16, 2014, http://time.com/2993605/health-care-debt-deficits-budget/)

For years, America’s health care costs grew at an unsustainable rate. That was the main reason America’s long-term fiscal position looked unsustainable as well; Medicare, Medicaid, and other health programs were spiraling out of control. But our health care cost inflation is no longer unsustainable. That’s huge news, because it means our long-term deficits should be manageable, too. Louise Sheiner and Brendan Mochoruck of the Brookings Institution compared the Congressional Budget Office’s latest fiscal outlook with its projections from five years ago, and the shift is striking. In 2009, the CBO expected Medicare spending to skyrocket from 3% to 6% of GDP by 2030; it now expects much more modest growth to less than 4% of GDP. Overall, former CBO director Peter Orszag, President Obama’s first budget director, calculated the projected savings in federal health spending since the 2009 report at $7.9 trillion. Those numbers, like all long-term budget estimates, could change radically. And while Obamacare’s cost controls contributed to the cost slowdown, it’s not clear how much they contributed. Policy wonks and political hacks will have plenty of time to argue about why the cost curve is bending. But the trend itself, as Orszag argues, is the most important trend in fiscal policy in decades. It’s the difference between a deficit crisis and a phantom deficit crisis. In 2009, graphs of projected federal health spending looked like ski slopes; graphs of all other spending looked like sidewalks. The long-term deficit problem was basically a medical problem. Now it’s not such a problem. The question is whether Washington will notice. Republicans have spent the last five-and-a-half years griping about the budget deficit, and most of their gripes have been absurd. They were wrong to accuse President Obama of creating a record trillion-dollar deficit, which he actually inherited from President Bush. They were wrong to criticize Obama for increasing the deficit with his 2009 stimulus bill, which was an amazingly effective Keynesian response to an economic crisis; the budget-balancing austerity approach the GOP was advocating led to much slower recoveries and double-dip recessions in Europe. And they were wrong to accuse Obama of turning the U.S. into Greece; the deficit has shrunk by more than half during his presidency, dropping from 10 percent of GDP to less than 4 percent as the recovery has progressed. We still have a big national debt, and the CBO expects it to grow from 74% of GDP today to 106% in 25 years. We’ll spend trillions of dollars servicing that debt, and we should remember how Bush squandered President Clinton’s surpluses with unpaid-for tax cuts and unpaid-for wars every time we cut the check. But we are not Greece. Our finances are looking better in every way.

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The obesity epidemic is exaggeratedBasham & Luik, 08 Professor at Johns Hopkins & Senior Fellow at the Democracy Institute(Basham, Patrick, and John Luik. "Is the obesity epidemic exaggerated? Yes." BMJ: British Medical Journal 336.7638 (2008): 244)

The claims, both in the media and in professional publications, about an epidemic, its causes, consequences, and cure often exceed the scientific evidence and mistakenly suggest an unjustified degree of certainty. The fact that cases are “clearly above normal expectancy” anchors the concept of an epidemic. In this respect, describing obesity as an epidemic is subject to two difficulties.¶ Definition of normal¶ Firstly, it is difficult to determine normal expectancy. Much of the data on overweight and obesity are limited, equivocal, and compromised in terms of extent and the reliability of the measurements and the populations sampled. In the US, for example, data about population weights date from only 1960. Several pieces of evidence, however, suggest that the contemporary situation may be close to, rather than in excess of, normal. The earliest national survey shows that in 1960 45% of the US population was overweight, accordingto sex specific weight for height tables (corresponding to a body mass index of 25 to <30).1 In the 1970s, 22% of US men aged 18-19 were overweight compared with 16.7% of boys aged 12-19 in 2002.2 Fogel’s ongoing work in various countries on the relation between health, mortality, nutrition, and technology suggests that as populations grow healthier, prosperous, and long lived they gain in height and weight.3 Moreover, current data are highly equivocal in their support for claims of an epidemic. For example, the average population weight gain in the US in the past 42 years is 10.9 kg or 0.26 kg a year.4 Yet, between 1999-2000 and 2001-2002, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, there were no significant changes in the prevalence of overweight or obesity among US adults or in the prevalence of overweight among children.2¶ Association with mortality¶ Secondly, the determination of the categories of normal, overweight, and obese is entirely arbitrary and at odds with the underlying evidence about the association between body mass index and mortality, a fact that destroys the index’s scientific pretensions and diagnostic value. The bands for overweight and obesity in the US, for example, are the product of the 1997 National Institutes for Health task force report on the prevention and treatment of obesity that supposedly links these bands to increased risk of death. However, the study on which the report is based does not support these linkages.5 It found that the death risks for men with a body mass index of 19-21 were the same as those for men who were overweight and obese (29-31). The study’s findings are not unusual. Flegal and colleagues found the weight group with the lowest death rate was overweight,6 while Gronniger’s analysis found negligible differences in risk of death among people with body mass values from 20 to 25.7 Even where there are significant associations, the risks are so modest as to be highly suspect. For example, whereas the reported lung cancer risks for smokers are typically 10-15 times higher than for non-smokers, the death risks for overweight and obese people are in many instances closer to 0.5-1.75 above those for people with normal weight.8 Despite the supposedly abnormal levels of overweight and obesity, life expectancy continues to increase. According to the UK Office for National Statistics, the current life expectancy of 77.2 years for men and 81.5 for women will rise by 2031 to 82.7 and 86.2, respectively.

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No impact to economic decline --- countries respond with cooperation not conflict Clary, 15 PhD in Political Science from MIT and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown, 15(Christopher, “Economic Stress and International Cooperation: Evidence from International Rivalries,” MIT Political Science Department, Research Paper No. 2015-8, p. 4)

Economic crises lead to conciliatory behavior through five primary channels. (1) Economic crises lead to austerity pressures, which in turn incent leaders to search for ways to cut defense expenditures. (2) Economic crises also encourage strategic reassessment, so that leaders can argue to their peers and their publics that defense spending can be arrested without endangering the state. This can lead to threat deflation, where elites attempt to downplay the seriousness of the threat posed by a former rival. (3) If a state faces multiple threats, economic crises provoke elites to consider threat prioritization, a process that is postponed during periods of economic normalcy. (4) Economic crises increase the political and economic benefit from international economic cooperation. Leaders seek foreign aid, enhanced trade, and increased investment from abroad during periods of economic trouble. This search is made easier if tensions are reduced with historic rivals. (5) Finally, during crises, elites are more prone to select leaders who are perceived as capable of resolving economic difficulties, permitting the emergence of leaders who hold heterodox foreign policy views. Collectively, these mechanisms make it much more likely that a leader will prefer conciliatory policies compared to during periods of economic normalcy. This section reviews this causal logic in greater detail, while also providing historical examples that these mechanisms recur in practice.

US leadership is inevitableBeckley, 11 Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a Fellow at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia,(Michael, “The Unipolar Era: Why American Power Persists and China’s Rise Is Limited,” September, http://michaelbeckleydotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/beckley_writing-sample6.pdf)

The second assumption is that U.S. hegemony is highly consolidated . In other words,

American power is entrenched to the point that other countries accept it as a fact of life they must deal with rather than a condition they can hope to change. The U.S. enjoys this status because it is the world’s first extant hegemon – it did not overturn an existing international order, rather, the existing order collapsed around it, leaving the U.S. alone at the apex of a global system of alliances and international institutions.21 As a result, the U.S. has become the “greatest superpower ever” with a more complete and dominant portfolio of economic, military, and institutional capabilities than past hegemons ever had.22 In terms of economic capabilities, the U.S. combines size with a high level of development and a low level of dependency , not only possessing the largest GDP in the world, but also the highest per- ‐ capita GDP and the lowest ratio of trade to GDP among the major powers.23 The

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military gap between the U.S. and others is even starker . U.S. military spending constitutes

nearly 50 percent of global military spending and is eight times greater than that of the number- ‐ two power (China). Even before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. had over 200,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen deployed in more than a hundred countries. As a result, the U.S. is the only country with global power projection capability . The U.S. also plays a leading role in all major international institutions. In the United Nations (UN), the U.S. is one of five permanent members of the Security Council and thus holds veto rights over all matters that come before the council. The U.S. can also ignore the Security Council, as it did in waging war in Kosovo in 1999 and Iraq in 2003, because it is capable of unilaterally deploying decisive military power. The U.S. is also the dominant power in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe is always an American officer, and NATO allies depend on the U.S. for security much more than the other way around. Moreover, American contributions to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are sufficient to give the U.S. veto power over any major policy change, and U.S. market power makes it the most influential member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). These dominant capabilities translate into influence . Most obviously, they provide the U.S. with an array of tools with which to reward and punish other states. The United States can provide, restrict, or deny access to the American market, technology, foreign aid, political support in international organizations, bribes, and White House visits. These tit-‐for-‐tat bargains with individual states, however, are not as consequential as America’s power over aspects of the international system. Hegemony is not just preponderant power, it is

“structural power.” 24 It is the power to set agendas, to shape the normative frameworks within which states relate to each other, and to change the range of choices open to others without putting pressure directly on them. It is, at once, less visible but more profound than brute force.25

US leadership doesn’t solve warsMonteiro, 14 Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale, 14(Nuno, Theory of Unipolar Politics, p. 181-184)

At the same time, the first two-and-a-half decades of our unipolar system have been anything but peaceful in what concerns U.S, involvement in interstate conflict. U.S. forces have been employed in four interstate wars – Kuwait (1991), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001-), and Iraq (2oo3-2011) – in addition to many smaller interventions including Bosnia, Haiti, Somalia, and Sudan.5 As a result, the United States has been at war for fifteen of the twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War, In fact, the first two-and-a-half decades of unipolarity — representing around 1o percent of U.S. history account for more than 30 percent of the nation's total wartime.6 For critics of U.S. interventionism, " the central question [of contemporary

international politics] is how to contain and moderate the use of military force by the U nited

S tates."8

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Table 5 presents a list of great powers divided into three periods: from 1816 to 1945, multipolarity; from 1946 to 1989, bipolarity; and unipolarity since 1990.9 Table 6 then presents summary data about the incidence of war during each of these periods. Unipolarity is by far the most conflict prone of all systems according to two important criteria: the percentage of years that great powers spend at war and the incidence of war involving great powers. In multipolarity, 18 percent of great-power years were spent at war versus 16 percent in bipolarity. In unipolarity, in contrast, a remarkable 64 percent of great-power years have been

until now spent at war – by far the highest percentage in all systems . Furthermore, during multipolarity and bipolarity the probability that war involving a great power would, break out in any given year was, respectively, 4.2 percent and 3.4 percent. Under unipolarity, it is 16.o percent – or around four times higher . It might be argued that the higher number of years that great powers spent at war under unipolarity are merely the result of the long, grinding, and unforeseen occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq by U.S. forces.11 But even if these two wars had gone according to U.S. plans – if the Afghanistan War had ended in the spring of 2002 and the Iraq War in the summer of 2003 – unipolarity would still be particularly prone to great-power involvement in war . Even if the United States had not occupied either Afghanistan or Iraq, it would still have spent 16.0 percent of the post-Cold War years at war, which is about the same as the respective percentages for bipolar and multipolar systems. In other words, even if the United States had refrained from any military occupations, the frequency of its use of military force in major operations would still give us no reason to believe that unipolarity is any more peaceful than any other past configuration of the international system. As things turned out in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the last two-and-a-half decades saw a sharp increase in both the incidence of conflict and the percentage of great-power years spent at war. This is a particularly puzzling finding given that the current unipole – the United States – is a democracy in a world populated by more democracies than at any time in the past. In light of arguments about how democracies are better able to solve disputes peacefully, choose to engage only in those wars they can win, and tend to fight shorter wars, the United States should have spent fewer years at war than previous nondemocratic great powers.12As we can see, post-Cold War history can be used in support of both the widespread claim that the overall level of conflict has declined and of the claim that the United States has experienced an unprecedented level of involvement in interstate war . Reality seems to be chafing against the view that unipolarity produces no incentives for conflict; at least in what concerns the unipole's involvement in interstate wars, the past two-and-a-half decades seem to point in the opposite direction.

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Small Farms Advantage Organic farms growing alreadyFeedstuffs, 17(“Number of certified organic farms up 13%,” http://www.feedstuffs.com/news/number-certified-organic-farms-13)

The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced new data indicating that the organic industry continues to expand domestically and globally, with 24,650 certified organic operations in the U.S. and 37,032 around the world.The 2016 count of U.S. certified organic farms and businesses reflects a 13% increase between the end of 2015 and 2016, continuing the trend of double-digit growth in the organic sector. The number of certified operations has increased since the count began in 2002, and this is the highest growth rate since 2008.Organic certification is an “opt-in” voluntary standard that is managed through a public/private partnership. USDA accredits and oversees approximately 80 businesses and state governments that directly certify organic farms and businesses. USDA provides a number of educational resources to help organic producers access this growing market. These include interactive videos that help candidate farmers understand how to get and maintain organic certification and fact sheets that explain the value proposition of organic certification and outline the standards in a clear manner.The complete list of certified organic farms and business is available through the Organic Integrity Database of certified operations maintained by USDA-accredited certifying agents. Launched in 2015, the database discourages fraud by providing more accurate and timely information about operations certified to use the USDA organic seal. The database also supports supply chain connections between buyers and sellers of organic goods.Laura Batcha, chief executive officer and executive director of the Organic Trade Assn., said the group "is thrilled and not surprised to see the strong growth in the number of certified organic operations in the United States and worldwide." Organic certifiers reported record numbers of new applicants in 2016, the association added.

Farm subsidies make large farms inevitable.Brucker, 08 Senior policy associate with the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, (Traci Bruckner, May 2016. “Agricultural Subsidies and Farm Consolidation,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75.3, 623–648)

Although agricultural subsidies were begun during the New Deal to provide enough income to enable farmers to continue operating, their net effect has been to raise the price of farmland and to squeeze many owner-operated farms out of existence, leaving mostly large-scale operations that are often tied to agribusiness. Numerous efforts have been made, with limited success, to mitigate this problem by limiting the subsidy to small or mid-size farm operations.

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The 2014 farm bill, adopted by the U.S. Congress, made the situation worse. Rather than imposing stricter limits on subsidies to the largest farms, the legislation removed existing limits, ended direct payments, and increased subsidies for insurance against crop losses and income risk. The new law not only provides a windfall to owners of very large farms, it also encourages plowing of fragile soils, since the risks of crop failure are now borne primarily by taxpayers. The article concludes by offering recommendations about how to correct these problems.

Monocultures not a threat --- wild variations prove.Trewavas, 01 PhD in Biochemistry from the University College of London, Professor of plant physiology and molecular biology at the Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, University of Edinburgh(Anthony Trewavas, 3/22/2001, “Urban Myths Of Organic Farming: Organic Agriculture Began As An Ideology, But Can It Meet Today's Needs?” Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology, http://www.monsanto.co.uk/news/ukshowlib.phtml?uid=4822)

Application of any ecological approach to agriculture is fraught with uncertainty. Ecosystems are thought to maintain stability as a result of diverse species composition. Modern agriculture, with its single-crop monoculture system, is claimed by organic proponents to be inherently unstable and unsustainable. It is true that crops rapidly disappear from fallow fields as they cannot compete with weeds, but wild, stable monocultures of species such as phragmites, wild wheat, (genetically uniform) spartina and mangroves indicate that ecological stability is not understood (11). Furthermore, although mixed cropping (supposedly mimicking ecological diversity) can reduce disease, other crop combinations accelerate disease spread (12, 13). Farms are land-management systems maintained to produce food, in which farmer activity replaces normal ecosystem feedback controls.

Industrial ag is key to maintain high yields --- this prevents billions of deaths, massive species extinctions, and massive methane warming from organic cows.Avery, 08 Director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues, (Dennis T. Avery, 6/16/2008.. “Will the Greens Sacrifice Their Own “Sacred Cows”?” Canada Free Press, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=5643)

Organics are not the answer: Wired notes that organic farms yield less food per acre. Actually, the organic yields are only about half as high as conventional because the world has an urgent shortage of manure. So all-organic farming would give up half the current world food output, threatening hunger for billions and extinction for species whose wild forests get cleared to plant more low-yield crops. Additionally, organic steers are on pasture much longer, burping up twice as much methane per pound as a feedlot steer, according to the UN’s FAO—and needing three times as much of the world’s scarce land.

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Adaptation and intervening actors check the tail-end risks of warming cause extinction.Farquhar, 17 et al., Project Manager at FHI responsible for external relations, M.A in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Oxford, 17(Sebastian FARQUHAR, “Existential Risk: Diplomacy and Governance,” Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford, Global Priorities Project 2017, https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risks-2017-01-23.pdf)

The most likely levels of global warming are very unlikely to cause human extinction .15 The existential risks of climate change instead stem from tail risk climate change – the low probability of extreme levels of warming – and interaction with other sources of risk. It is impossible to say with confidence at what point global warming would become severe enough to pose an existential threat. Research has suggested that warming of 11-12°C would render most of the planet uninhabitable,16 and would completely devastate agriculture.17 This would pose an extreme threat to human civilisation as we know it.18 Warming of around 7°C or more could potentially produce conflict and instability on such a scale that the indirect effects could be an existential risk, although it is extremely uncertain how likely such scenarios are.19 Moreover, the timescales over which such changes might happen could mean that humanity is

able to adapt enough to avoid extinction in even very extreme scenarios .The probability of these levels of warming depends on eventual greenhouse gas concentrations. According to some experts, unless strong action is taken soon by major emitters, it is likely that we will pursue a medium-high emissions pathway.20 If we do, the chance of extreme warming is highly uncertain but appears non-negligible. Current concentrations of greenhouse gases are higher than they have been for hundreds of thousands of years,21 which means that there are significant unknown unknowns about how the climate system will respond. Particularly concerning is the risk of positive feedback loops, such as the release of vast amounts of methane from melting of the arctic permafrost, which would cause rapid and disastrous warming.22 The economists Gernot Wagner and Martin Weitzman have used IPCC figures (which do not include modelling of feedback loops such as those from melting permafrost) to estimate that if we continue to pursue a medium-high emissions pathway, the probability of eventual warming of 6°C is around 10%,23 and of 10°C is around 3%.24 These estimates are of course highly uncertain.It is likely that the world will take action against climate change once it begins to impose large costs on human society, long before there is warming of 10°C. Unfortunately, there is significant inertia in the climate system: there is a 25 to 50 year lag between CO2 emissions and eventual warming,25 and it is expected that 40% of the peak concentration of CO2 will remain in the atmosphere 1,000 years after the peak is reached.26 Consequently, it is impossible to reduce temperatures quickly by reducing CO2 emissions. If the world does start to face costly warming, the international community will therefore face strong incentives to find other ways to reduce global temperatures.

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